108 KNOWING DICKENS
white teeth and his red hair, is actually empowered by the keenness of his eye
to wreak revenge on his unconscious employer Mr. Dombey. Because he has
seen the revengeful passion within Edith, Carker—employed by Dombey in
the role of mediator—insinuates himself into the couple and breaks it apart.
At the same time Carker retains a more primitive evil eye, which he exercises
on Rob the Grinder. When Carker hires him as a spy, Rob “was fascinated
by Mr Carker, and never took his round eyes off him for an instant.” Fixated
by his own resentment against Dombey, Rob’s eyes cannot leave his sadistic
employer; they are “nailed upon him as if he had won the boy by a charm,
body and soul” (DS 22).
The oppressed child whose internalized resentment takes form as fascina-
tion reappears in David Copperfield. Although the narrative displays David’s
determination to represent himself as free from anger or resentment, and
to forgive those who have betrayed his love, it can be very suggestive about
David’s attractions to powerful, punitive men. The sado-masochistic attrac-
tion to Mr. Creakle is expressed quite directly: “I don’t watch his eye in
idleness, but because I am morbidly attracted to it, in a dread desire to know
what he will do next, and whether it will be my turn to suffer, or somebody
else’s.” David’s perverse fascination with his schoolmaster’s power extends
beyond physical eyeing to prolonged fantasy: “Here I am in the playground,
with my eye still fascinated by him, though I can’t see him. The window at
a little distance from which I know he is having his dinner, stands for him,
and I eye that instead. If he shows his face near it, mine assumes an imploring
and submissive expression” (DC 7). Brilliantly entangling the “I” with what
the “eye” is drawn to, the passage reveals that David (like Rob the Grinder)
is deeply implicated in the worship of power; that (like Uriah Heep), he is
personally privy to the false humility of the resentful victim. There is nothing
innocent about this child’s eye in its fascination with that empty window.
David’s most intimate rival is, of course, Uriah Heep, who resents David’s
genteel status and divines the secrets David wants to evade: his shaming
childhood employment, and his unconscious love for Agnes Wickfield. Like
Carker, Uriah derives his power from his desire to revenge himself on those
who have humiliated him, and from his knowledge of the silences and verbal
pieties that sustain a middle-class life. David is immediately fascinated by
Uriah’s watchful repulsiveness. Describing his red-brown, eyelashless eyes,
“so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to
sleep,” David watches Uriah watching him for full minutes at a time as he
pretends to be working at his law books:
Though his face was towards me, I thought, for some time, the writing
being between us, that he could not see me; but looking that way more